Getting Started, Getting Experimental

Note: this blog is an assignment for Museums and New Media, a fall 2010 course at Tufts University.


The history of work and industry is everywhere, and everywhere, it's unique. In recent decades, museums dedicated to 19th and 20th century coal mining, textile mills, steel plants, car manufacturing, railroads, and hundreds of other industries, have increasingly appeared on the cultural landscape. Is there one in your own back yard?

 

A century ago, the Colonial Revival in arts and architecture crafted a nostalgic interpretation of the past, an elite reaction against the perceived dislocations of modern industry, immigration, urbanization. Long story super short, lots of house museums were created. Today, we might talk about an "Industrial Revival," celebrating a vision of traditional industry through museums and the adaptive reuse of ex-factory spaces. Like the Colonial Revival, the "Industrial Revival" builds its own set narratives; it grapples against the dislocations of a postindustrial experience. This blog aims to look around these conventions toward experimental new approaches to interpreting the working past.              

 

Colonial Revival (Wikimedia Commons)/Industrial Revival? (National Park Service)

 Back to your local museum. Why does it exist? What is its main message? After working at one and visiting many over the past six years, I've come to think about museums of work and industry in terms of three main narratives that are conventionally used to answer these questions, but that I feel can be problematic:

 

 1. Commemoration narrative. "Here lies the XYZ Steel Works, dead and gone but not forgotten." Most museums incorporate this basic narrative to a certain extent; relying on it too heavily can lead to nostalgia and irrelevance. It clearly relegates the industry to the realm of past experience, but can also provide a healing sense of continuity in the face of change. See the Lackawanna Steel Plant Museum, which works to "preserve and document the memories of the newly-extinct steel industry."



2. Process narrative. "They don't make 'em like they used to." Most industrial museums also contain a component of explaining the production process. The Boott Cotton Mills Museum at Lowell National Historical Park (ok, this is where I work) has a demonstration weave room and exhibits detailing the main steps of making cloth. This narrative is often intruguing, but can also become very didactic. The Mill City Museum in Minneapolis gets a little more outside of the box with an interactive baking laboratory inside its historic flour mill.
 

3. Progress narrative. "In preserving the history of the once-innovative local widget industry, we can reclaim this spirit of Progress for this city as we forge ahead into the 21st century." Many cities suffering the loss of their traditional economies have seen historic preservation as a route to "revitalization." This narrative contains the positive impulse to make history relevant, but may simplify a complex, painful past for the sake of making it useful to one vision of the future.


Lewis Hine, Cleaner and Sweeper -- Spinning Dept.
of the American Linen Co., Fall River, Mass. (1916).
Library of Congress. Amazing photo, slightly more
subversive narrative.

  

Lewis Hine, Powerhouse Mechanic (1920). Wikimedia Commons. Amazing photo, pretty conventional
progress narrative.




Problem is, this narrative often wants to equate old industries with progress, innovation, power, ingenuity, awesomeness, the American spirit incarnate. Contrast this to, say, many of Lewis Hine's early 20th century photographs, which reflect the exploitative underpinnings of our nation's historic industries. The "Progress narrative" often restricts critical interpretations and multiple points of view that may in fact better serve future progress.



This blog identifies these existing narratives in order to look for alternatives in action. We'll explore the fringes of "Industrial Revival." I believe that our country's working past can play a vibrant role in our cultural present, but that in order to do so we need to break down a few walls, take our exhibits off the assembly line, and get experimental with labor heritage.

So, do you see these mainstream narratives in use? Are there others?